Sorry for the late update ......spacecraft Atlantis is back home on this Wednesday from its final mission and the landing was smooth.

My earlier post was on last inspection of Atlantis before landing. Atlantis has been on 32 flights. It was first launched in October 1985. It has made 5 military missions, 7 flights to the Russian Mir Space station and 11 to ISS ( International Space Station).

The astronauts in Atlantis have done the final inspection of the shuttle as it will re-enter the atmosphere of Earth on Wednesday after spending 7 days in International Space Station.

The crew of Atlantis have spent 7 days in ISS where they installed a new Russian research module and changed out six solar array batteries over the course of three spacewalks.The crew members have also cleaned their space suits used during three space station assembly spacewalks in preparation for landing .

There are 6 crew members in Atlantis and they will be there till next week.

It is said that mission specialists Garrett Reisman and Steve Bowen will venture outside the platform for about 6.5 hours to install an antenna and a robot tool tray.Bowen is making his fourth spacewalk and Reisman is making his second.

The other key tasks will include the replacement of six large batteries and the addition to the underside of the platform of a Russian docking and storage module.

Space Shuttle Atlantis has been a work force for mankind for the last 25 years. May be this Friday, Atlantis will be making its final journey to space before retiring. The stats of Atlantis says that Atlantis has spent 282 days in space, circled the globe in 4,462 orbits and traveled 115 million miles during 31 flights that featured 185 different astronauts which is fantastic.

If you want to get a view of Atlantis in its final journey then skywatchers across US will get a fine opportunity to watch this weekend. Both shuttle and space station will be visible as separatte entities as shining "stars" on Friday and Saturday evening.By Sunday evening, Atlantis will be docked to the ISS, and both will appear as a single bright moving "star."

Atlantis and ISS will be visible across parts of southern Canada and most of the 48 continental United States.

If you live in US and want to know viewing schedule for your particular hometown then you can easily find out by searching for one of these four popular Web sites: Chris Peat's Heavens Above, Science@NASA's J-Pass, NASA's SkyWatch and Spaceweather.com or by logging into this site.

NASA has spent $220 million on testing a new escape system rocket in New Mexico on this Thursday dummy crew module more than a mile up in just 20 seconds to demonstrate how a future manned spacecraft could be pulled to safety in the event of a catastrophic on-pad rocket failure.

A solid-fuel motor was used which generated some 500,000 pounds of thrust, the launch abort system ignited with a torrent of orange fire and smoke pulling the dummy crew module to nearly 450 mph in just 2.5 seconds with an acceleration of 16 times the force of gravity.

The heavily instrumented capsule, which will not be used again, hit the ground two minutes and 14 seconds or so after launch, 6,919 feet from its takeoff point. Touchdown velocity was 16 mph, about 6 mph slower than predicted.

"It's a great day for the country, for NASA and for industry," said NASA Test Conductor Don Reed. "It was absolutely successful. We didn't see anything anomalous. Everything worked as it was expected. In fact, we actually touched down at significantly less velocity than we predicted. The performance was absolutely astounding."

After recent failure of India's space program a unique India-made smallest satellite StudSat which promises to send Indian into higher orbit will leave the ISRO Satellite Center in Bangalore and move to Sriharikota for integration for launch on May 9.The satellite weighs around 850 gms and it has been designed and developed by about 40 undergraduate students of Engineering college in Bangalore and Hyderabad.StudSat is an acronym of student satellite . It will be the second Indian satellite to be launched by ISRO in a year.Last year on 20th April , 2009 the 40-kg Anusat was placed into orbit . StudSat is the country's first pico satellite - the smallest one.The satellite will be placed in a 700 -km sun synchoronous orbit and will have a mission life ranging between six months and 2 years . The cost of project was Rs. 55 lakhs in Indian currency.